Google+ Is Stealing Facebook and Twitter's Thunder- Click here http://bit.ly/pgUOtA for full article

 Google+ Is Stealing Facebook and Twitter's Thunder- Click here http://bit.ly/pgUOtA for full article 

Google+, a new social networking site from Google that launched in June 2011, has generated huge attention in the media and prompted defensive reactions from social network leaders like Facebook and Twitter. Growing from 1.5 million to 7.5 million users in only a week -- an increase of nearly 400% -- Google+ has shown that even in limited release it can generate huge interest.

Facebook seemed to be caught off-guard by the meteoric rise of Google+. Facebook immediately sped up its announcement that it had reached a deal with Skype to provide video chat for users, likely prompted by the attention received by the new "Hangout" feature on Google+ that provides group video chat, a service unavailable from all major competitors. By the end of the week, Zuckerberg was disparaging the new "Circles" paradigm on Google+ which allows users to tailor sharing more intuitively (and privately) than the "Groups" feature on Facebook. It did not help matters that Zuckerberg, who initially showed some good humor by activating his own Google+ account, has now deleted his account citing privacy concerns -- despite Facebook's poor reputation for privacy, and users' inability to easily "delete" their profiles on Facebook.

There is clearly a large, untapped market for a new kind of social network, and Google+ appears to be filling that need. Smart business owners will keep an eye on Google+ and start developing new strategies to use in marketing to this audience. It appears that many of the defectors from Facebook to Google+ are highly educated professionals with above average income levels. This is obviously a very lucrative market, and companies that develop ways to target those users effectively will be rewarded with nearly exclusive access to an elusive customer base.

The biggest change for business owners will be the lack of "business pages" found on Facebook. While a company can start a Google+ page like an individual users, there isn't a special class of pages tailored to the advertising needs of businesses. Furthermore, smaller businesses that may have used Facebook's services for targeted advertising campaigns will find no such functionality on Google+. The site will likely start showing Google AdSense advertisements in full launch, which show ads targeted at users based on their personal data and their previous search history. This is good news for large businesses, but likely difficult for small businesses without large advertising budgets.

Business owners who want to get out their message will need to have users add them to "Circles," much like businesses on Twitter must get users to "follow" them or Facebook businesses get users to "like" their page. Strategies to promote followers -- such as offering coupons for users who follow on Twitter -- will be easy to adapt to Google+. Learning how to effectively market with a Google+ profile will likely take some research, experimentation, and possibly professional consulting.